marcopolomint

Yes, fair enough. It’s a separate but related argument, because the MBP was often the de facto option for corporate environments and academics (if there is a Mac option, that is) and of course there are legions of arts and humanities students with MBPs too. MBP was the option for me, not Air, in my work environment. Maybe now the 14" and 16" MBP have become more ‘pro’ so the option really should be Air, as they are not just ‘good enough’ but excel at these types of everyday use tasks.

I knew there’d be someone who gets all ‘but this isn’t a scientific test’ blah blah, despite what Monica says in the article [RTFA!]:

First, this is not the official battery life estimate with which I will ultimately be updating the review. That will be based on multiple trials, and hopefully many that are not as… weird as what I did here.

But, also, it’s clearly written in an amusing non-scientific style, and probably better reflects the use cases of the majority of laptop users – i.e. not doing 3D work, running complex simulations, or compiling complex statistical datasets. Reading, writing, research, watching stuff. And periods where battery stress is more acute than others. Then, when you write:

So while this sounds fun and oh-so amazing, it isn’t all that out of this world for current generation of technology.

I wonder how many laptops you’ve had experience of. Monica even says when the Gigabyte Aero 16 would be dying; in my experience, a lot of laptops run woefully short of their advertised times, and is a reason I read the battery life section of reviews avidly. Yes, overall there has been improvement in the past 5+ years especially, but those improvements don’t filter through to all products evenly. One of the reasons I returned an AMD 5800HS laptop was because the actual battery life was nowhere as good as claimed.

It is light-hearted stories like this that we can get a better insight into ‘everyday use’

Don’t forget those who plug in to an external monitor, keyboard, mouse. Apple (and only Apple) dictates that you can close the clamshell and still power a monitor but only if it is plugged into mains power.

On a MBP with 2 x USB-C this meant using a hub and power filled both ports. On MBA M2 you’d free up one of the ports. So it is great for people like me. I use my laptop 60% at desk, 40% elsewhere.

Yeah, saw this on CreateDTech yesterday. The performance distance is pretty stark, and due to economies of scale it’s a problem that’s unlikely to go away for either M2 MBP or presumably M2 Air – I’ll be reading the Air reviews with interest.

Thing is, there are plenty of people like me who have historically always gone for the baseline models, because we simply refuse to eat up Apple’s ridiculous storage/RAM upgrade prices. It sucks that now all Macbooks are not ‘equal’ performance-wise.

Wow. I guess they’d be using the Steam Deck internals (or maybe a sequel) to power this, hence Deck-ard?

I’ve long wanted to buy the Oculus Quest but the Facebook/Meta ownership was a block. Valve doing something in this space is promising.

Yup, Sherlocked. Spitballing ideas for revenue generation before the ship goes down… Never gonna compete with free and wireless.

Windows is a mess right now.

Hyperbole, much? It’s not exactly a mess. For the most part, it’s a lean and efficient OS and to give MS their credit, they have been paring off legacy aspects of the OS for a while. It’s still a bit of a crunky surprise when old settings pop up, for example, but a lot of what users need is right there without needing to go under the hood too often.

At first I thought it made sense for security reasons, the T1 and T2 chips make OS installation and security easier. But in fact T1 was introduced on the 2016 MBP.

This is pretty shocking. I know they went in all aggressive with the transition from PowerPC to Intel, but there were far fewer Apple machines out there in the world. This is going to affect a lot of people.

Don’t be ridiculous. For the vast majority of the purchasing public who will use these, thunderbolt isn’t even a consideration. People who care will be getting the 14 or 16 version.